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AE H.264 Exporter - Awful Audio Quality

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
November 1, 2022
16 replies
4592 views

The new H264 encoder out of AE is a welcome addition, but am I the only one experiencing absolutely horrible audio quality? Even if I set the AAC bitrate to 512kbps, music still sounds heavily compressed. Video quality is solid; not sure why the audio is so bad.

If I send it through to Media Encoder, audio is fine, even at a lower bitrate.

Is this a bug of some kind, or is there some hidden setting I can change?

Error or problem

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Mylenium

Legend

Additional info provided by user via PM:

I made a short video showing the bug if it can help. You can find it here :

https://clients.dubon.fr/Adobe/Rec.mp4

First render, only one file, no bug.

Second render, first file has a problem, the 2nd is ok.

For some reason, the 3rd render is ok, but usually it's not, it's still a bit random

4th render, both files are wrong.

It's not obvious in this record, but it doesn't change anything if I open or not the output module options, or audio options before rendering.

Mylenium

Legend

I've re-classified this as a bug, as it seems you're on to something here. Sounds liek an initailization problem where the renderer is re-using some setting or buffer instead of refreshing it and then things go sideways.

Mylenium

Legend

Fair enough. Just throwing out ideas to narrow down the possibilities. 🙂

Mylenium

D

Dubon

Participating Frequently

It seems that if I change anything in the output module between 2 renderings, the bug does not occur. For exemple, I do a first rendering in 48kHz (emptying cache), it's ok, I do a second one, it bugs, I switch to 44.1kHz, it works, I render a second time in 44.1kHz, it doesn't. So maybe there is a bug with audio cache or something.

D

Dubon

Participating Frequently

Hi, me again ! I actually found that the bug starts when you render 2 files, one with 2 output modules or 2 different renderings (even 2 different comps). Then, one of the rendered file is corrupted. After that, every file is corrupted until you change a parameter in the output module options.

Mylenium

Legend

Interesting. Does it make a difference if you use VBR or CBR? At least in VBR modes it could simply be AE getting the math wrong or the caches needed for the passes getting botched.

Mylenium

D

Dubon

Participating Frequently

No, it makes no difference. One thing I tried is tu use MPEG instead of AAC, and it seem to work fine. Maybe I didn't tried it long enough though, iPhone can't read those files anyway and I use them as previews on my web server so that's not a solution for me.

D

Dubon

Participating Frequently

Sorry for the double post but it also seem to work fine when I empty my cache first, but due to the randomness of the bug, I'm not sure either.

D

Dubon

Participating Frequently

Hello, I've exactly the same problem. When I analyse the .mp4 file afterwards, the bitrate is not the one indicated in the Output Module, and, actually, it's kind of random (it goes from 40kbps to the actual wanted bitrate).

It's independant of the audio device (it 's the same when I use any of my external cards or my internal cards). I also cleaned my preferences, it change nothing. It happen with a brand new installation and the default H.264 presets, in hardware and software encoding. It's the same on 3 of my computers, with nvidia 3080 and 3090 (even if it should not change anything for software rendering). For now, I still use mediaencoder, and still looking for a solution if it exists!

Mylenium

Legend

Without any info about your system, your audio devices, the relevant prefs, exact render settings and so on we can't tell you much. You need to be much more specific.

Mylenium

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